Each political police force had its own vocabulary. In this "directive" from 1976, the Stasi explains the stakes of "zersetzen", a key element in both what they did and how they thought: disintegrate, dissolve, decompose. The goal was literally to "disintegrate negative-enemy elements" that could harm the Party’s supremacy. Any and all means were allowed, including resorting to the regular police, the workplace, "informal collaborators" in the person’s entourage, etc. The goal: use contradictions amongst opponents of the State themselves to "divide, paralyze, disorganize and isolate," to keep them from acting effectively. Major actions had to be directly approved by the Minister of the Stasi, Erich Mielke. Everything had to be done "quickly and coherently," and be well documented. This famous directive from the Council of Ministers was classified Top Secret by Mielke, just 30 copies of it were made.

The insignia of the KGB (Committee for State Security in the USSR) neatly sums up the ideology of the key institution for maintaining Soviet power: being the shield and the sword of the Party. The shield to defend the revolution, the sword to destroy its enemies. The "Chekists", as KGB agents called each other in honor of the first Soviet police force, the Cheka, were a separate caste, better trained, better informed, and totally devoted to the center. In 1983, Time magazine described the KGB as the best foreign espionage – i.e. for espionage (first directorate) and counter-espionage (2nd and 3rd directorates) activities – organization in the world. But Yuri Andropov, appointed KGB head in 1967 and secretary general of the USSR en 1982, was most concerned with the fight against domestic "ideological subversion" (5th and 7th directorates).

Lubyanka Square, Moscow, the statue of "Iron Felix," a Polish Bolshevik, founder of the Cheka and an implacable inquisitor, was still the symbol of the KGB’s huge, arbitrary power. Since the birth of the Soviet political police, Lubyanka, near Red Square in Moscow, is the incarnation of State-sanctioned terror. The big yellow building that houses the KGB (and housed its precursors, the Cheka, the GPU, the MVD and the NKVD) hides in its basement countless cells where "enemies of the people" suffered horrific abominations – rumors having almost as dissuasive an effect as reality. Stalin even had the churches on the square around the building razed to highlight it. On August 22, 1991, the statue representing the head of the Cheka was pulled down by the angry crowd after the failed coup against Gorbachev. The work of one of the greatest artists of Socialist realism, Eugueny Vuchetich, it has since been relocated along with other dethroned fallen icons to Moscow’s Arts Park. But thanks to the siloviki’s (secret-servicemen’s) return to power under Putin, there has been talk of putting the statue of Felix the Red back on its original pedestal.

From 1962 to 1986, three widely publicized spy exchanges took place on Glienicke Bridge, over the Havel, between Berlin and Potsdam, south-west of the East German capital. For this reason, the bridge – which was strategically located at the ‘border’ between the American and the Soviet sectors of Berlin – came to be known as the Bridge of Spies. The KGB maintained on observation post nearby. In 1962, Gary Powers, the pilot of an American U2 spy-plane shot down over the USSR was exchanged for an American Communist spy. Then in 1985, 23 East German political prisoners were exchanged for four spies held in the United States. Finally, a year later, in February, 1986, five KGB agents (two Czechs, a Russian computer specialist, a Pole and an East German) were swapped for the refusenik Natan Chtaransky and four Western agents. The Cold War was also an intelligence war; the information gathered being used to justify – on both sides – the necessity of their own armament in case "hot" war were to break out as well as their own counter-espionage. Finding and analyzing information about the "other side," had vital stakes. Yet this somewhat paranoid world view didn’t provide a clear understanding of the societies’ structural movements.

Tailing huge numbers of people, eavesdropping and wire-tapping foreigners’ hotel rooms and even in dissidents’ eaves, mail confiscated both randomly and in a targeted manner. Czechoslovak secret services, StB, used any and every possible human and technological means at their disposal for keeping track of "counter-revolutionary elements" within their own population. Agents knew how to hang wallpaper to hide microphones. Fifty full-time translators were employed to decrypt the 800 wire-tapped phone calls and 170,000 intercepted letters a day. This effort supplied evidence that could be used in future trials of "class enemies." Like all Soviet police forces, the StB copied the KGB’s methods. But each one had its own specificities and specialties like East Germany’s spy lovers (a.k.a. "Romeos") and spy-lover-secretaries for high-ranking officials and "Bulgarian umbrellas" dipped in curare to assassinate exiled political opponents.

The Polish political police (SB) had its work cut out for it in dealing with the Catholic Church, the only one in Eastern Europe, and the union Solidarnosc. As we can see in this interview with young people who supported the newly formed union, intimidation, including physical, was a common-place method for the Polish "Chekists." The SB also managed to infiltrate the Church. A certain number of priests were listed as collaborators by the National Memory Institute (IPN), which houses the secret police archives from 1944 to 1989.